The Travels of Marco Polo

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The Travels of Marco Polo is the usual English title of Marco Polo's travel book, Il Milione. Milione comes from either The Million, which was a name used to mock the book, which many claimed was filled with "a million lies", or from Polo's family nickname Emilione. The "million lies" are derived mostly from the fact that many of the things described in his book are described in the hundred, thousands, or millions, and those reading his work were dubious of the large numbers. On the contrary, they were doubtful regardless (Polo was reputed to have a habit of exaggerating things). The book is his account of his travels to China, which he calls Cathay (north China) and Manji (south China). the tradition is that Polo dictated the book to a romance writer, Rustichello da Pisa, while in prison in Genoa between 1298–1299; Rusticello may have worked up his first Franco-Italian version from Messer Marco's notes.

The Travels is divided into four books. Book One describes the lands of the Middle East and Central Asia that Marco encountered on his way to China. Book Two describes China and the court of Kublai Khan. Book Three describes some of the coastal regions of the East: Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and the east coast of Africa. Finally, Book Four describes some of the recent wars among the Mongols and some of the regions of the far north, like Russia.

The Travels was a rare popular success in an era before printing. It was translated into many European languages within Marco Polo's lifetime, but the original manuscripts are now lost. The first English translation is the Elizabethan translation by John Frampton, The most noble and famous travels of Marco Polo..

Marco Polo's description of the Far East and its riches inspired Christopher Columbus's decision to try to reach those lands by a western route. A heavily annotated copy of Polo's book was among the belongings of Columbus.

An interesting thing to note is that Marco Polo took this trip with his uncle and his father (both of whom had been to China previously), neither of them published any known works about their journeys.

The first attempt to compare manuscripts and provide a critical edition was in a volume of collected travel narratives that was printed at Venice, 1559.^[1] The editor Giovan Battista Ramusio, collated manuscripts from the first part of the fourteenth century,^[2] which he considered to be "perfettamento corretto" He was of the opinion, not held by modern scholars, that Messer Marco wrote first in Latin, which was quickly translated into Italian; he has been able to use a Latin version "of marvelous antiquity" lent him by a friend in the Ghisi family of Venice.

The edition of Luigi Foscolo Benedetto, Marco Polo, Il Milione, under the patronage of the Comitato Geografico Nazionale Italiano (Florence: Olschki) 1928, collated sixty additional manuscripts, in addition to some eighty that had been collected by Sir Henry Yule, for his 1871 edition. It was Benedetto who identified the compiler as Rustichello da Pisa,^[3] and his established text has provided the basis for modern translations: his own, in Italian (1932), and Aldo Ricci, The Travels of Marco Polo (London, 1931).

The oldest surviving Polan manuscript is in Old French^[4] heavily contaminated with Italian; for Benedetto, it is the basic text, which he corrected by comparing it with the somewhat more detailed Latin of Ramusio, together with a Latin manuscript in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana.

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[edit] External links

• Project Gutenberg's texts of The Travels of Marco Polo, in Sir Henry Yule's edition